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School Board Considers Copyright Ownership of Student and Teacher Works
schwit1 writes "A proposal by the Prince George's County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual. It's not unusual for a company to hold the rights to an employee's work, copyright policy experts said. But the Prince George's policy goes a step further by saying that work created for the school by employees during their own time and using their own materials is the school system's property."
Most tech companies claim ownership of anything created by employees, whether created at work or on their own time.
But, the students are not employees, and signed no waiver when they enrolled. Claiming ownership of the student's creations is rediculous.
Profane, but seriously, fuck off.
On what grounds do they thing they possibly own student work?
I can vaguely see an exceptionally unethical argument for teachers work, but student work? It's not like they have a choice as to whether they attend and it sure as hell is not work for hire.
What is wrong with these people?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, they can, but it won't be legally binding until they get the employees and students to agree to assign their copyrights.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If, therefore, they do claim ownership, the parents should bring a case against the school system for violation of child labor laws.
This seems to be only about "work produced for the school", meaning papers for class, lesson plans and the like. It doesn't seem as though they plan to lay claim to your Great American Novel (TM) if you plan on writing one while enrolled or employed there.
In the 1990s many universities made faculty and grad students who took research-assistantships assign copyrights for "relevant to their job" works even if they were done "on their own time." The logic was that the school was paying you for your brain, or at least the part of your brain related to your job, and your brain didn't punch a clock.
I can see a K-12 school system asking teachers to assign copyrights to creative works that are relevant to their jobs, but not to things that are irrelevant. A 2nd grade teacher who does art work that isn't related to teaching 2nd graders shouldn't have to quit her job to keep the copyrights on her paintings. On the other hand, it is reasonable to tell new-hire or renewing-contract teacher who creates worksheets for use in the classroom that things she creates in the future will belong to the district.
As for K-12 students, this is not only immoral but probably illegal: Until the age of 16 in most states, school attendance is mandatory. Up until high school graduation or a certain age cut-off, usually 21, it's an "entitlement" - teenagers over 16 have a legal right to finish a 12th grade education.
Expect a judge to enjoin the district from claiming copyright on student works shortly. Expect either a negotiated agreement or a lawsuit and temporary injunction barring non-job-related forced copyright assignments within a few months.
Expect high-quality teachers who earn extra money selling what they create to begin avoiding this district immediately.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's the results of his creative efforts.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
> could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual
So, my daughter went to an art magnet school. During that time she created many works of art, some of which she entered into contests and won awards. She has commercial plans for a series of cartoon characters she invented while in school. If the school claimed ownership, she would not hesitate to sue, and she'd have a lot of company. Content creators can get really sticky about their own content, even as teenagers.
Therefore, I don't think the part about the school copyrighting content created by the students is going to fly. All they'd need is a couple of high profile losses, and we'd skip immediately to step 4, punishment of the innocent.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Some MBA heard that x% of employees are earning a few dollars on the side and they realized that this could plug some budget holes (holes created by administration taking trips to Hawaii to learn the latest in ed-tech).
But in classic MBA style they forget about incentive where if they take that money then the work won't be done. I suspect that again in classic MBA style that they need to "centralize" and "quality control" information leaving the system.
This probably all stems from a requirement from some way overpriced anti-plagiarism software; even worse the pitch from said salesman might have documented (with great pie charts) that by doing this money grab the anti-plagiarism software would effectively be free.
Lastly by claiming copyright they get better control over information that makes them look bad. So if some student makes a video of a drunk teacher and puts it on youtube then the school system will demand that youtube take it down on the grounds that they have copyright. I would love to see them trying to apply this to teachers with blogs, twitter accounts, and writing op-ed pieces for the local newspaper. These fools forget that there are a zillion places to put a drunk teacher video that will oddly enough defend the students' first amendment rights.
To me this is just another great lesson for the kids that they learn that the educational system exists not one spec for them but entirely for the administration. In Ontario, Canada the school board got completely screwed by the government (before they screwed the government) so now like petulant children they are trying to keep the teachers from extra-curricular activities. They are now arguing that holding back these services won't harm the children. Whoa, wait a sec. Losers.
If there's no union contract and no law to protect teachers' jobs, then the employer can simply say "by showing up for work after __REASONABLY_FAR_IN_THE_FUTURE_DATE__ you agree to __NEW_CONDITIONS_OF_EMPLOYMENT__.
For most jobs, "reasonably far in the future date" for a change that hurts employees would be anywhere from 2 weeks to a few months for items that can wait, or immediately for health and safety issues, emergencies, and issues where the deadline is imposed from outside (e.g. a change in law), etc.
For teachers, "reasonably far in the future" date is either the start of the next school year or, if it's late in this school year or late in the "job search season" for teachers who are planning to change employers, the following school year.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Works created by employees and/or students specifically for use by the Prince George’s County Public Schools or a specific school or department within PGCPS, are properties of the Board of Education even if created on the employee’s or student’s time and with the use of their materials."
Just wow. Normally I would say if you live in PG county, now is the time to move. But the sad reality is that PG county is much poorer than neighboring Montgomery county... it's always been time to move out if you could. I was once robbed at gunpoint in PG county. The only reason the criminal was ever caught was because he made the mistake of trying the same crime in Montgomery county an hour later. The police there found over a dozen wallets and purses in the car from people he had robbed in PG county.
At my university, this is already the policy, more or less. If you develop software and release it GPL, they'll let you be. But otherwise, they own everything you produce. This is also true for most companies. Interestingly, if a history prof writes a book, he gets to keep all the profit. But if you as an engineer or programmer develop something and try to sell it without the university, even if done on your own time, the university will claim a conflict of interest and claim ownership. Many corporations do this as well. In some cases this may have some merit in that you have additional resources that you wouldn't otherwise have, and therefore couldn't have done this without corporate help. But in many cases the individual truly is developing this on their own - and the corporate entity still claims it. My thinking is that if corporations want to raid the fruits of their employees' off hours activity, they ought to be forced to take it to court. Of course, the only way this can be fair is if the corporation pays the entire court cost including that of the employee (will never happen). Likewise, the employee should have taken pains to demonstrate that their product was produced independent of corporate resources. Finally, if the employee wins, he keeps his job, keeps his invention, and keeps his money (having no court costs).
Sorry if I'm a bit discombobulated... I keep restarting my typing due to a certain two year old...
My first thought was "yeah, Maryland *IS* close to Washington, D.C."
Cue rimshot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I used to facepalm when reading this kind of reports.
Now I simply pity those that put up with that kind of crap and laugh at their expense.
Its so bad that its funny again. Especially since its always something new and unexpected.
Take care not to end up in prison over a contract violation when unlocking your smart phone, my friends.
1. Form an LLC
2. Acting as your child's agent, put them under contract with the LLC for their creative works until their 18th birthday, with an option for the child to retrieve all their rights from the LLC at that time.
3. ???
4. Screw the school district!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
They are at least thinking about the issue before there are lawsuits.
Hopefully they will think a little more and come up with something less outrageous. My university's policy was that the student owned the copyright but the university acquired a royalty-free licence for its own use.
I imagine that this will incite a slew of creative and intelligent students dropping out of school. I certainly wouldn't put up with having my school suddenly flipping the switch and saying that everything I do belongs to them. As a musician and web designer, that would be an instant deal breaker - I would seek home education immediately, or go with one of the many more reasonable options online (such as Florida Virtual School).
If it was a private school doing this I could see they might have a chance of an argument. As a public school system, tax payer funded, doing this it is complete crap. Isn't there something in the u US about government agencies not holding copyrights anyway? Or is that just on the federal level? Or am I completely mistaken on this point?
"I believe my response would be go to Hell. "
You can't just be angry at the messages coming out of this crazy factory. You have to be angry at institutional structures encouraging the lunacy coming out of these boards on a seemingly daily basis.
of the need to repeal copyright
They can't take copyright without compensation. It would mean renegotiating the contracts for teachers.
If they want the copyright on my kids work, that will $1000 a page. The kid is a creative genius.
I will supply the crayons the paper. If they are willing to pay.
It sounds like it does, on the surface, but lesson plans are something teachers currently trade, sell, and use as a basic resource. The difference between a just-graduated teacher and a teacher with ten years of experience is that the teacher with experience has a stack of lesson plans, and can swap out which ones they use on any given day based on the progress, skill, and mood of their students. And, let's not forget, all of this is being created in the teacher's own time, outside of school hours.
Oh, and I doubt the school district will be making these available for free to their own teachers. (Unlike the teachers themselves, who might share with a co-worker.)
Any teacher who's spent any amount of time working on their own lesson plans would immediately start looking for a job outside the county. Any teacher who's any good wouldn't take a job in that county. You'll have beginner teachers who don't know any better, or teachers who've been there for ages and don't want to move, who'll just be hanging out until retirement. (And not updating any of their lesson plans.) Oh, and teachers who buy all of their lesson plans, because they can't be bothered to come up with them themselves. And the beginners will probably leave as quick as possible.
So you're trying for high-turnover, and chasing out any teacher who wants to invest their own time and effort into teaching the kids. Which means you'll get low-quality teaching, and low-quality schools.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
No. Sorry. You cannot copyright that which you a.) don't create, and b.) don't pay for. Sorry. but students are not your employees, nor are they work-for-hire unless you decide to start paying them for coming to school.
How much you wanna bet a Republicant was behind this brain-dead idea?
What do you mean by "becoming"? This country has been fascist to the hilt for a long time now. Bullshit like Citizens United was just the icing on the cake.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
In Australia generally speaking a literary, dramatic, artistic or musical work made pursuant to terms of employment belongs to the employer. That position can be modified by agreement, but in the absence of agreement if you get paid a salary for doing it, it belongs to the boss. If you're not an employee then it belongs to the author, again subject to modification by agreement. Things like sound recordings or films are different, copyright in those would belong to the person who owns the equipment on which they were created. That could be the school. A contract with a child to assign copyright may well not be enforceable. A private school might include an indemnity by parents in favour of the school in their contract with the parents. A public school couldn't insist on it. In either case if a school board, without any contractual mechanism, simply declared that they owned copyright in students literary works it would have much the same legal effect as if they had declared they owned Manhattan with an option on Rhode Island.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
If work done by a teacher at home because property of the school, then that work would become work for the school Then, any injury at home tangentially related to the work would become a work related injury.
Fight Spammers!
The school board is going to be faced with very expensive legal fees and lose. This will get challenged and their claim to ownership of student works will be thrown out. Hopefully the school board will be forced to pay the legal fees of the kids and a class action lawsuit will be brought against the school board heaping on more costs so that nobody else tries this. Copyright law is pretty clear that the creator of the work is the copyright owner unless explicitly otherwise agreed. Students are minors and can't agree to this.
So, what would've happened if this was a policy at the University of Helsinki, in 1991?
This is true... but the company is actually *PAYING* the employee.
Last time I checked, you have to pay to go to school.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just one more step in the downfall of what used to be our country.
Teaching is a collegial activity, so a good lesson plan would normally be shared within a staff room. Student's work is produced by minors where the school is 'in loco parentis' so their work would become school property to protect them from exploitation by adults, plagiarists and commercial interests.
That's how it works in Australia. Public school teachers are state employees so all their work is the property of the Crown. Good teaching material can be (and is) distibuted to other publis schools to give system-wide improvement. A teacher who gains a reputation for producing good stuff can negotiate this into promotion or a consultancy. State employees are not supposed to produce any paid work outside their job but in practice teachers who work as tutors, coaches or musicians etc are not imposed upon by the government as there is a tacit acknowledgement that teachers often need another income. Private school teachers' work is the property of their employee (diocesan office, school board) for much the same reason.
School administrators (puiblic or private) have a legal 'duty of care' to children. They won't stop parents from taking their kids to modeling agencies or auditions but if they produce something in school, say their major artwork for the matriculation exam, the school can arrange a professional exhibition and prevent students from beign ripped off.
American libertarians will doubt that government agencies can be benign (and if you want gold medal bastardry only a government can provide it) but not all countries have vast armies, huge spy agencies, heavily armed police or kill people with robot aircraft. The Department of Education will be staffed at policy and implementation level by people who believe in the value of education and teachers actually like children!
It's not all about academics. Schools provide opportunities to develop and hone social skills, to forge friendships and to discover new interests. Home schooled students need to be involved in these things (granted this is quite possible). I don't quite understand the problem of standardized tests. If you don't have a standardized test, how will you compare the students? The test should be a guideline as to what is considered common knowledge for students of a particular schooling level. Take it with a grain of salt.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
Preparing children for the corporate world.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm just thankful that we've made the news without any murders, theft, or corruption.
I thought that we had gotten rid of the idiotic school board when they disbanded it in 2002 and got Marilyn Bland and the others out of there. (although, we haven't gotten rid of her yet)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Copyright it yourself before you turn it in, then sue them for copyright infringement.
Among many others, including the fact that the teachers (not all, but many) are horrible, standardized testing, and well, the fact that PG county is a shitty area.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Yes teachers spend lots of time after hours working, but they do have lots of scheduled time to design tests and lesson plans as well.
I don't know what it was like when you went to school, but in the high school I went to the teachers didn't have much scheduled time to work on such things. You got a half day every couple of months. You got one "free" period most days, but not every day, which was pretty much your lunch break. What scheduled time do you speak of? Both of my parents were teachers. You know what those half days consisted of? Mostly meetings. Again, not much scheduled time to work on lesson plans and the such. Teachers worked on all that stuff at home. Scheduled time my pink behind...
No, not student works. That's a 5th amendment "takings clause" issue. This is a public school, an agency of government. Public school students are not employees. Not even close. Any taking of student property must be compensated.
I don't think any public school board has been dumb enough to try this before. State universities have been careful about this, after some troubles. (Private universities are a different case. They're not state actors.)
I love the encoding issues I find on this site. Instead of \xE2\x80\x9C for UTF-8, you get \xE2\x6F\x65 for the left double quotation mark (U+201C), which can't be decoded as UTF-8 because it's not proper UTF-8 due to the values of the second and third bytes. How does that even happen? \x6F\x65 and \x80\x9C aren't even remotely related-looking in binary form, and converting to another encoding doesn't work either. WTF? Or maybe it's Windows' fault. Yeah. That's it. It's not Slashdot's fault. It's Windows' fault. Stupid Windows.
I have been a captive in America my entire life. Everybody and everything uses customary units instead of metric.
That place is a shit hole, and I wouldn't worry about them producing anything fit for public consumption in the near future.
Speaking as a life long resident of the state and former spouse of a former employee of PGCPS, this comment is woefully underrated and 100% correct.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The State compels the student to go to school.
The State compels the student to do the schoolwork.
The State asserts ownership of the schoolwork.
Now let's assume that the student writes a bestselling novel derived from his schoolwork.
Does that belong to the State?
(a) The moment such an insane statute passes, the school district is going to be sued by a lawyer parents claiming that the State is taking the property of their child and that they are entitled to just compensation for the taking. Is the school district REALLY going to spend tax dollars defending their right to Little Sally's stick figure drawing?
(b) The school district is also going to have a hell of a time demonstrating how taking the student's work is rationally related to educating that student.
Some crazy morons need to get elected off the school board.
If a board of education (not even a business) is thinking about claiming copyright for things that are not theirs, where will it stop? It doesn't matter if they do it or don't do it. It doesn't matter if they lose a battle in court. This is a common thought that many people in power are thinking: how can I claim someone else's idea as our own and make money off of it while screwing them? We see it all the time in the business world. (Especially the music world, but in many other areas as well.) This is a trend that is not slowing down. I would say this article is an indication that it is accelerating.
Indeed, how long will it be before I write a story or make a drawing or write a program at my home in my own privacy only to have it considered Microsoft property or property of the government?
The 13th Amendment contains the loophole "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I hate that word, "rubric" as used by educrats.
It's just dopey.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The teacher thing of "in their own time with their own materials" is misleading. Teachers are paid and expected to do work out of school hours as part of their salary. Also, if a teacher decides to create and market their own teaching materials or write about a new teaching method, they have access to lots of classes of kids with which to test their product on. They could be getting paid by the state to do research that will ultimately only benefit them, using other people's children as Guinea pigs.
"I love the encoding issues I find on this site."
HTML escape characters used to work, but that stopped working quite a while ago. Most of them, anyway.
I'm not sure what they did. I believe most of the site is coded in Perl. But BuiltWith says the site encoding is in UTF-8. So, there must be some kind of munging going on in the back-end.
"Is this why I can't ever read the quote symbol? It is all garbled?"
That happens most often when people use copy-and-paste, because they are pasting in begin- and end-quotes, instead of the common universal double quotes: ".
Something about their encoding is weird. There is no doubt about that.
It is funny you mention that. I was doing some scripting, and didn't think about copy and paste of code that was in the KB for what I was doing. Whoever wrote the KB, put one of those quotes in there. The code read correctly, until I finally spotted that the quotes were slightly curved. Needless to say the code borked repeatable before I finally caught it. I made notes that there was this issue so future people didn't make the same mistake. Guess my fault for copy and paste, but it was the same code over and over for this one solution.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
The school now owns the nude photos of children that they spy on with their school-provided laptop webcams while they're home in their bedroom.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100221/2118128243.shtml
A foreseeable result of bringing current "total business" (like the Germen concept of "Total War") corprate culture into schools.
THINK! It's patriotic
You know, there ARE Makers and Takers in our society, and while the Makers Make, the Takers feel they are entitled to take a big percentage right off the top of whatever profits the Makers bring in.
They think bloviation adds value, hold countless pointless meetings, attempt to make real money out of accounting tricks, and love words like synergy and downsizing.
This is just another instance of Takers trying to steal the work of others, so as to avoid the process of having to work themselves to produce something of REAL, tangible value.
They are parasites who's only real talent, if they have any at all, is to leave with their booty before the destruction they've wrought encompases themselves too.
I can't help but think of another current /. story that theorises that there have been no real inventions in the past 50 years. If it's true, is there any wonder?
Why is the incentive to create only extended to businesses in the current economic model? Why do those who wax poetic about how the OWNERS of creative works must be "incentivised" to create, while refusing provide any real incentives to the people who ACTUALLY create?
Who WOULDN'T feel excited to contribute to their employer's bottom line if they were to see rewards commencerate with the impact their ideas and work had on that bottom line?
THINK! It's patriotic
Same was true with my wife when she was teaching. In fact, any "free" period that wasn't filled with meetings was usually filled with giving extra help to kids who were encountering difficulties in the regular lessons.
Oh and those wonderful "summers off" that teachers have? They aren't lounging around doing nothing. They're coming up with lessons for the next year.
I agree with Daniel_Staal. This will lead to a) good, experienced teachers fleeing before they are forced to start from scratch and not take their lesson plans with them, b) inexperienced teachers being trapped into the job they have (and thus getting bitter, ceasing to care, and becoming bad teachers), and c) quality of education declining. Hey, but at least the school board can bring in some additional cash by suing over any lesson plan remotely similar to the ones they own RIAA-style, right?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Works created by and for the federal government are public domain; for state governments, it's determined by each state. Some make their publications public domain, others maintain copyright.
Sounds like that liberty loving state Texas to me.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Yeah, it could be considered a copyright violation if you didn't have to waive copyright and assign perpetual use license over to turnitin when you in fact actually turn it in. That's the insidious part of this: certain schools and teachers require you to use turnitin to actually turn your homework in. The few students that have fought against this and have lost their cases appear to have lost their cases because they actually (at least once) used the service to turn in their homework, thereby agreeing to the terms and conditions of the service, with one of the terms being that you grant turnitin a perpetual license to your work.
.
People! Stand up for yourselves and your own work! Students are NOT employees of a school, whether elementary or high-school or college level!!! Their work is not done as "work for hire": it is done as a compulsory portion of their education and training!!! Not as work!
I ran into this awhile back on some ebooks I was trying to read. I got a crash course in sed and awk because nothing else could parse large files quickly and replace things.
Cheap storage VM.
Even better - the school owns the nude photos that the children make of themselves on their mobile phones, thereby is involved in the making and distribution of child pornography.
In my school district High School Teachers work 6 out of 9 periods. One period for lunch and two "prep periods". For elementary school teachers they have breaks for when the students are in lunch recess and music/gym etc.
Many trade schools have a right to their students work. I went to one and part of the student agreement I signed was a perpetual license to use my work created there royalty-free for advertising purposes. I saw no problem with that, especially since the agreement specifically said that I still owned the copyright to the work.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Seriously?
Are they really discussing freaking "ownership of content" in a school?
Maybe they should focus on... I don't know... Educating kids?
I know that in the US, schools are pretty much shopping malls, but c'mon...
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
Government agencies like NASA cannot charge for distribution of materials they create - all government documents are public domain.
Public Schools are government agencies.
If student and teacher works belong to the schools, they are public domain works.
Changa hates change.
(Modern versions of) Perl can work with UTF- 8 just fine, too. That makes it even more of a shame.